The story of Monte Rosa has forced us to anticipate the chronological order of events. We must now turn back, and follow the fortunes of the men whose names are linked with the great peaks of Tirol2 and of the Oberland. Let us recapitulate the most important dates in the history of mountaineering before the opening of the nineteenth century. Such dates are 1760, which saw the beginning of serious mountaineering, with the ascent of the Titlis; 1778, which witnessed Beck’s fine expedition to the Lysjoch; 1779, the year in which the Velan, and 1786, the year in which Mont Blanc, were climbed. The last year of the century saw the conquest of the Gross Glockner, one of the giants of Tirol.

The Glockner has the distinction of being the only great mountain first climbed by a Bishop. Its conquest was the work of a jovial ecclesiastic, by name and style Franz Altgraf von Salm-Reifferscheid Krantheim, Bishop of Gurk, hereinafter termed—quite simply—Salm. Bishop Salm had no motive but the fun of a climb. He was not a scientist, and he was not interested in the temperature at which water boiled above the snow line, provided only that it boiled sufficiently quickly to provide him with hot drinks and shaving water. He was a most luxurious climber, and before starting for the Glockner he had a magnificent hut built to accommodate the party, and a chef conveyed from the episcopal palace to feed them. They were weather-bound for three days in these very comfortable quarters; but the chef proved equal to the demands on his talent. An enthusiastic climber compared the dinners to those which he had enjoyed when staying with the Bishop at Gurk. There were eleven amateurs and nineteen guides and porters in the party. Their first attempt was foiled by bad weather. On August 25, 1799, they reached the summit, erected a cross, and disposed of several bottles of wine. They then discovered that their triumph was a trifle premature. The Glockner consists of two summits separated by a narrow ridge. They had climbed the lower; the real summit was still 112 feet above them. Next year the mistake was rectified; but, though the Bishop was one of the party, he did not himself reach the highest point till a few years later.

Four years after the Glockner had been climbed, the giant of Tirol and the Eastern Alps was overcome. The conquest of the Ortler was due to a romantic fancy of Archduke John. Just as Charles VII of France deputed his Chamberlain to climb Mont Aiguille, so the Archduke (who, by the way, was the son of the Emperor Leopold II, and brother of Francis II, last of the Holy Roman emperors) deputed Gebhard, a member of his suite, to climb the Ortler. Gebhard made several attempts without success. Finally, a chamois hunter of the Passeierthal, by name Joseph Pichler, introduced himself to Gebhard, and made the ascent from Trafoi on September 28, 1804. Next year Gebhard himself reached the summit, and took a reading of the height by a barometer. The result showed that the Ortler was higher than the Glockner—a discovery which caused great joy. Its actual height is, as a matter of fact, 12,802 feet. But the ascent of the Ortler was long in achieving the popularity that it deserved. Whereas the Glockner was climbed about seventy times before 1860, the Ortler was only climbed twice between Gebhard’s ascent and the ascent by the Brothers Buxton and Mr. Tuckett, in 1864. Archduke John, who inspired the first ascent, made an unsuccessful attempt (this time in person) on the Gross Venediger, another great Tyrolese peak. He was defeated, and the mountain was not finally vanquished till 1841.

The scene now changes to the Oberland. Nothing much had been accomplished in the Oberland before the opening years of the nineteenth century. A few passes, the Petersgrat, Oberaarjoch, Tschingel, and Gauli, had been crossed; but the only snow peaks whose ascent was undoubtedly accomplished were the Handgendgletscherhorn (10,806 feet) and a peak whose identification is difficult. These were climbed in 1788 by a man called MÜller, who was engaged in surveying for Weiss. His map was a very brilliant achievement, considering the date at which it appeared. The expenses had been defrayed by a rich merchant of Aarau, Johann Rudolph Meyer, whose sons were destined to play an important part in Alpine exploration. J. R. Meyer had climbed the Titlis, and one of his sons made one of the first glacier pass expeditions in the Oberland, crossing the Tschingel in 1790.

J. R. Meyer’s two sons, Johann Rudolph the second and Hieronymus, were responsible for some of the finest pioneer work in the story of mountaineering. In 1811 they made the first crossing of the Beich pass, the LÖtschenlÜcke, and the first ascent of the Jungfrau. As was inevitable, their story was disbelieved. To dispel all doubt, another expedition was undertaken in the following year. On this expedition the leaders were Rudolph and Gottlieb Meyer, sons of J. R. Meyer the second (the conqueror of the Jungfrau), and grandsons of J. R. Meyer the first. The two Meyers separated after crossing the Oberaarjoch. Gottlieb crossed the GrÜnhornlÜcke, and bivouacked near the site of the present Concordia Inn. Rudolph made his classical attempt on the Finsteraarhorn, and rejoined Gottlieb. Next day Gottlieb made the second ascent of the Jungfrau and Rudolph forced the first indisputable crossing of the Strahlegg pass from the Unteraar glacier to Grindelwald.

To return to Rudolph’s famous attempt on the Finsteraarhorn. Rudolph, as we have seen, separated from his brother Gottlieb near the Oberaarjoch. Rudolph, who was only twenty-one at the time, took with him two Valaisian hunters, by name Alois Volker and Joseph Bortis, a Melchthal “porter,” Arnold AbbÜhl, and a Hasle man. AbbÜhl was not a porter as we understand the word, but a knecht, or servant, of a small inn. He played the leading part in this climb. The party bivouacked on the depression known as the Rothhornsattel, and left it next morning when the sun had already struck the higher summits, probably about 5 a.m. They descended to the Studerfirn, and shortly before reaching the Ober Studerjoch started to climb the great eastern face of the Finsteraarhorn. After six hours, they reached the crest of the ridge. Meyer could go no further, and remained where he was; while the guides proceeded and, according to the accounts which have come down to us, reached the summit.

Captain Farrar has summed up all the available evidence in The Alpine Journal for August 1913. The first climber who attempted to repeat the ascent was the well-known scientist Hugi. He was led by the same Arnold AbbÜhl, who, as already stated, took a prominent part in Meyer’s expedition. AbbÜhl, however, not only failed to identify the highest peak from the Rothhornsattel, but, on being pressed, admitted that he had never reached the summit at all. In 1830, Hugi published these facts and Meyer, indignant at the implied challenge to his veracity, promised to produce further testimony. But there the matter dropped. Captain Farrar summarises the situation with convincing thoroughness.

“What was the situation in 1812? We have an enthusiastic ingenuous youth attempting an ascent the like of which in point of difficulty had at that time never been, nor was for nearly fifty years after, attempted. He reaches a point on the arÊte without any great difficulty; and there he remains, too tired to proceed. About this portion of the ascent, there is, save as to the precise point gained, no question; and it is of this portion alone Meyer is a first-hand witness. Three of his guides go on, and return to him after many hours with the statement that they had reached the summit, or that is what he understands. I shall examine later this point. But is it not perfectly natural that Meyer should accept their statement, that he should swallow with avidity their claim to have reached the goal of all his labours? He had, as I shall show later, no reason to doubt them; and, doubtless, he remained firm in his belief until Hugi’s book appeared many years after. At once, he is up in arms at Hugi’s questioning, as he thinks, his own statements and his guides’ claims. He pens his reply quoted above, promises to publish his MS. and hopes to produce testimony in support. Then comes Hugi’s reply, and Meyer realises that his own personal share in the expedition is not questioned; but he sees that he may after all have been misled by, or have misunderstood, his guides, and he is faced with the reported emphatic denial of his leading guide, who was at that time still living, and could have been referred to. It may be said that he wrote to AbbÜhl for the ‘testimony,’ and failed to elicit a satisfactory reply. Thrown into hopeless doubt, all the stronger because his belief in his guide’s statement had been firmly implanted in his mind all these nineteen years, is it to be wondered at that he lets the matter drop? He finds himself unable to get any testimony, and realises that the publication of his MS. will not supply any more reliable evidence. One can easily picture the disenchanted man putting the whole matter aside in sheer despair of ever arriving at the truth.”

We have no space to follow Captain Farrar’s arguments. They do not seem to leave a shadow of doubt. At the same time, Captain Farrar acquits the party of any deliberate intention to deceive, and admits that their ascent of the secondary summit of the Finsteraarhorn was a very fine performance. It is noteworthy that many of the great peaks have been attempted, and some actually climbed for the first time, by an unnecessarily difficult route. The Matterhorn was assailed for years by the difficult Italian arÊte, before the easy Swiss route was discovered. The south-east route, which Meyer’s party attempted, still remains under certain conditions, a difficult rock climb, which may not unfitly be compared in part with the Italian ridge of the Matterhorn. The ordinary west ridge presents no real difficulties.

The first complete ascent of the Finsteraarhorn was made on August 10, 1829, by Hugi’s two guides, Jakob Leuthold and Joh. Wahren. Hugi remained behind, 200 feet below the summit. The Hugisattel still commemorates a pioneer of this great peak.

So much for the Meyers. They deserve a high place in the history of exploration. “It has often seemed to me,” writes Captain Farrar, “that the craft of mountaineering, and even more the art of mountaineering description, distinctly retrograded for over fifty years after these great expeditions of the Meyers. It is not until the early ’sixties that rocks of equal difficulty are again attacked. Even then—witness Almer’s opinion as to the inaccessibility of the Matterhorn—men had not yet learned the axiom, which Alexander Burgener was the first, certainly by practice rather than by explicit enunciation, to lay down, viz. that the practicability of rocks is only decided by actual contact. Meyer’s guides had a glimmering of this. It is again not until the ’sixties that Meyer’s calm yet vivid descriptions of actualities are surpassed by those brilliant articles of Stephen, of Moore, of Tuckett, and by Whymper’s great ‘Scrambles’ that are the glory of English mountaineering.”

But perhaps the greatest name associated with this period is that of the great scientist, Agassiz. Agassiz is a striking example of the possibilities of courage and a lively faith. He never had any money; and yet he invariably lived as if he possessed a comfortable competence. “I have no time for making money,” is one of his sayings that have become famous. He was a native of Orbe, a beautiful town in the Jura. His father was a pastor, and the young Agassiz was intended for the medical profession. He took the medical degree, but remained steadfast in his determination to become, as he told his father, “the first naturalist of his time.” Humboldt and Cuvier soon discovered his powers; in due time he became a professor at NeuchÂtel. He married on eighty louis a year; but money difficulties never depressed him. As a boy of twenty, earning the princely sum of fifty pounds a year, he maintained a secretary in his employment, a luxury which he never denied himself. Usually he maintained two or three. At NeuchÂtel, his income eventually increased to £125 a year. On this, he kept up an academy of natural history, a museum, a staff of secretaries and assistants, a lithographic and printing plant, and a wife. His wife, by the way, was a German lady; and it is not surprising that her chief quarrel with life was a lack of money for household expenses. The naturalist, who had no time for making money, spent what little he had on the necessities of his existence, such as printing presses and secretaries, and left the luxuries of the larder to take care of themselves. His family helped him with loans, “at first,” we are told, “with pleasure, but afterwards with some reluctance.” Humboldt also advanced small sums. “I was pleased to remain a debtor to Humboldt,” writes Agassiz, a sentiment which probably awakens more sympathy in the heart of the average undergraduate than it did in the bosom of Humboldt.

A holiday which Agassiz spent with another great naturalist, Charpentier, was indirectly responsible for the beginnings of the glacial theory. Throughout Switzerland, you may find huge boulders known as erratic blocks. These blocks have a different geological ancestry from the rocks in the immediate neighbourhood. They did not grow like mushrooms, and they must therefore have been carried to their present position by some outside agency. In the eighteenth century, naturalists solved all these questions by a priori theories, proved by quotations from the book of Genesis. The Flood was a favourite solution, and the Flood was, therefore, invoked to solve the riddle of erratic blocks. By the time that Agassiz had begun his great work, the Flood was, however, becoming discredited, and its reputed operations were being driven further afield.

The discovery of the true solution was due, not to a scientist, but to a simple chamois hunter, named Perrandier. He knew no geology, but he could draw obvious conclusions from straightforward data without invoking the Flood. He had seen these blocks on glaciers, and he had seen them many miles away from glaciers. He made the only possible deduction—that glaciers must, at some time, have covered the whole of Switzerland. Perrandier expounded his views to a civil engineer, by name Venetz. Venetz passed it on to Charpentier, and Charpentier converted Agassiz. Agassiz made prompt use of the information, so prompt that Charpentier accused him of stealing his ideas. He read a paper before the Helvetic Society, in which he announced his conviction that the earth had once been covered with a sheet of ice that extended from the North Pole to Central Asia. The scepticism with which this was met incited Agassiz to search for more evidence in support of his theory. His best work was done in “The HÔtel des NeuchÂtelois.” This hÔtel at first consisted of an overhanging boulder, the entrance of which was screened by a blanket. The hÔtel was built near the Grimsel on the medial moraine of the lower Aar glacier. To satisfy Mrs. Agassiz, her husband eventually moved into even more palatial quarters to wit, a rough cabin covered with canvas. “The outer apartment,” complains Mrs. Agassiz, a lady hard to please, “boasted a table and one or two benches; even a couple of chairs were kept as seats of honour for occasional guests. A shelf against the wall accommodated books, instruments, coats, etc.; and a plank floor on which to spread their blankets at night was a good exchange for the frozen surface of the glacier.” But the picture of this strange mÉnage would be incomplete without mention of Agassiz’s companions. “Agassiz and his companions” is a phrase that meets us at every turn of his history. He needed companions, partly because he was of a friendly and companionable nature, partly, no doubt, to vary the monotony of Mrs. Agassiz’s constant complaints, but mainly because his ambitious schemes were impossible without assistance. His work involved great expenditure, which he could only recoup in part from the scanty grants allowed him by scientific societies, and the patronage of occasional wealthy amateurs. The first qualification necessary in a “companion” was a certain indifference as to salary, and the usual arrangement was that Agassiz should provide board and lodging in the hÔtel, and that, if his assistant were in need of money, Agassiz should provide some if he had any lying loose at the time. This at least was the substance of the contract between Agassiz, on the one hand, and Edouard Desor of Heidelberg University, on the other hand.

Desor is perhaps the most famous of the little band. He was a political refugee, “without visible means of subsistence.” He was a talented young gentleman with a keen interest in scientific disputes, and an eye for what is vulgarly known as personal advertisement. In other words he shared the very human weakness of enjoying the sight of his name in honoured print. Another companion was Karl Vogt. Mrs. Agassiz had two great quarrels with life. The first was a shortage of funds, and the second was the impropriety of the stories exchanged between Vogt and Desors. Another companion was a certain Gressly, a gentleman whose main charm for Agassiz consisted in the fact that, “though he never had any money, he never wanted any.” He lived with Agassiz in the winter as secretary. In summer he tramped the Jura in search of geological data. He never bothered about money, but was always prepared to exchange some good anecdotes for a night’s lodging. Eventually, he went mad and ended his days in an asylum. Yet another famous name, associated with Agassiz, is that of Dollfus-Ausset, an Alsatian of MÜlhausen, who was born in 1797. His great works were two books, the first entitled Materials for the Study of Glaciers, and the second Materials for the Dyeing of Stuffs. On the whole, he seems to have been more interested in glaciers than in velvet. He made, with Desor, the first ascent of the Galenstock, and also of the most southern peak of the Wetterhorn, namely the Rosenhorn (12,110 feet). He built many observatories on the Aar glacier and the Theodule, and he was usually known as “Papa Gletscher Dollfus.”

Such, then, were Agassiz’s companions. Humour and romance are blended in the picture of the strange little company that gathered every evening beneath the rough shelter of the hÔtel. We see Mrs. Agassiz bearing with admirable resignation those inconveniences that must have proved a very real sorrow to her orderly German mind. We see Desor and Vogt exchanging broad anecdotes to the indignation of the good lady; and we can figure the abstracted naturalist, utterly indifferent to his environment, and only occupied with the deductions that may be drawn from the movement of stakes driven into a glacier. Let me quote in conclusion a few words from a sympathetic appreciation by the late William James (Memories and Studies)—

“Agassiz was a splendid example of the temperament that looks forward and not backwards, and never wastes a moment in regrets for the irrevocable. I had the privilege of admission to his society during the Thayer expedition to Brazil. I well remember, at night, as we all swung in our hammocks, in the fairy like moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that throbbed its way up the Amazon between the forests guarding the stream on either side, how he turned and whispered, ‘James, are you awake?’ and continued, ‘I cannot sleep; I am too happy; I keep thinking of these glorious plans.’...

“Agassiz’s influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt and decisive—all the more so that it struck people’s imagination by its very excess. The good old way of committing printed abstractions to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered at his hands. There is probably no public school teacher who will not tell you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in a room full of turtle shells or lobster shells or oyster shells, without a book or word to help him, and not let him out till he had discovered all the truths which the objects contained. Some found the truths after weeks and months of lonely sorrow; others never found them. Those who found them were already made into naturalists thereby; the failures were blotted from the book of honour and of life. ‘Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look and see for yourself’—these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric....

“The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could bring him facts. To see facts, not to argue or raisonniren was what life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the ratiocinating type of mind. ‘Mr. Blank, you are totally uneducated,’ I heard him say once to a student, who had propounded to him some glittering theoretic generality. And on a similar occasion, he gave an admonition that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was addressed. ‘Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you are a bright young man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then, what they will say will be this: “That Mr. X—oh yes, I know him; he used to be a very bright young man.”’ Happy is the conceited youth who at the proper moment receives such salutary cold-water therapeutics as this, from one who in other respects is a kind friend.”

So much for Agassiz. It only remains to add that his companions were responsible for some fine mountaineering. During these years the three peaks of the Wetterhorn were climbed, and Desor was concerned in two of these successful expeditions. A far finer expedition was his ascent of the Lauteraarhorn, by Desor in 1842. This peak is connected with the Schreckhorn by a difficult ridge, and is a worthy rival to that well-known summit. There were a few other virgin climbs in this period, but the great age of Alpine conquest had scarcely begun.

The connecting link between Agassiz and modern mountaineering is supplied by Gottlieb Studer, who was born in 1804, and died in 1890. His serious climbing began in 1823, and continued for sixty years. He made a number of new ascents, and reopened scores of passes, only known to natives. Most mountaineers know the careful and beautiful panoramas which are the work of his pencil. He drew no less than seven hundred of these. His great work, Ueber Eis und Schnee, a history of Swiss climbing, is an invaluable authority to which most of his successors in this field are indebted.

The careful reader will notice the comparative absence of the English in the climbs which we have so far described. The coming of the English deserves a chapter to itself.